Enterprise use of cloud technologies gathered pace in 2015, as firms looked to wind down their datacentre investments and move more of their IT infrastructure off-premise.

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While this trend played out, debate about how far the enterprise would be willing and able to go in the cloud raged on, with most providers offering the view that many will move to adopt a hybrid approach to IT consumption.

But for how long emerged as something of a divisive point for the cloud industry, with some declaring hybrid cloud as a stop-off on the enterprise’s journey to the public cloud, while others hailed it as the final destination.

However, with IT market watcher Gartner claiming hybrid cloud is still “two to five” years away from mainstream adoption, it seems we’re still some way from seeing a victor crowned in that debate.

Here, Computer Weekly takes a look back at some of the biggest cloud stories and trends from the past 12 months.

“We have more than 500 professional security researchers at Google,” he said. “These people are doing penetration testing, fuzzing our software with random bad API calls and doing in-depth security readings. Very few of you could afford 500 security researchers.”

As Amazon Web Services (AWS) retained its hold on the cloud market this year, its parent company decided it was high time to share precise details of just how big a contribution the firm’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) activities makes to its overall bottom line.

In short, it’s a lot, with Amazon.com’s third quarter results (published in October 2015) revealing that AWS now generates a similar level of operating income as its entire North American retail business.

Elsewhere, the analyst community has released a steady stream of reports this year that all neatly serve to highlight just how far ahead of the chasing pack in the cloud AWS now is.

For example, Synergy Research Group released a report in April 2015 that claimed the firm’s cloud infrastructure operations are now bigger than the combined businesses of its four nearest competitors (namely Salesforce, IBM, Microsoft and Google).

While Amazon continued to flourish in the public cloud, a pre-split Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) spent a sizeable portion of 2015 batting away claims it was planning to exit the public cloud market.

This was fiercely denied by HP in a blog post, which claimed Hilf’s comments were intended to imply that the firm was not interested in competing “head to head” with the big public cloud players, rather than not at all.

The G-Cloud framework has more than succeeded in its bid to make off-premise services more accessible and easier for the public sector to adopt, having chalked up more than £800m in sales since it launched in 2012.

Despite this, the way the government runs it has come under close scrutiny at several points in 2015, particularly in light of the Crown Commercial Service’s decision to introduce a 20% variance cap on G-Cloud deals to coincide with the launch of the seventh iteration of the framework in November 2015.

At the end of last year, analysts and suppliers alike were busy tipping hybrid cloud for take-off in 2015. Now, while it’s fair to say the term has become far more widely known and talked about over the last 12 months, the number of enterprises actually consuming IT in this way has not quite caught up yet.

And it was left to Gartner, and its hype cycle, to provide the industry with a short, sharp dose of reality on this point with its declaration that mainstream adoption of hybrid cloud technologies is still “two to five years” off, as just 10-15% of enterprises are using it.

The strength of the US dollar has been cited as a reason by many suppliers in 2015 when asked to shed some light on why their financial results may have disappointed Wall Street, and this has also had a knock-on effect for a number of cloud users too.

“The transition to cloud-oriented infrastructure and data platform architectures within enterprises’ datacentres continues to accelerate, yet the expansion of public cloud infrastructure in service providers’ datacentres around the world is an even larger driver of IT spending,” the analyst house said.

“A key driver of this acceleration is organisations’ development and use of internet of things services that require levels of agility and scale that only cloud services can deliver.”

This call for evidence is set to go on until 15 January 2016, and – if the CMA does find evidence of wrongdoing – this could have far-reaching consequences for the cloud storage market into the New Year.

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